The committee met at 4 p.m.

[B. D’Eith in the chair.]

B. D’Eith (Chair): Good afternoon, everyone. My name’s Bob D’Eith. I’m the MLA for Maple Ridge–​Mission and the Chair of the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services.

First, I’d like to express how grateful we are today to be on the traditional territory of the Lhtako Dené, Nazko, Lhoosk’uz Dené and ?Esdilagh nations.

We are a committee of the Legislative Assembly that includes MLAs from the government and opposition parties. Normally, we travel in the fall to hold public consultations and visit different regions of the province to hear directly from British Columbians about their priorities and ideas for the next provincial budget. This year we’ve moved our consultation to June to enable the committee to deliver a final report to the Legislative Assembly earlier in the budget process. We will be reviewing this new timeline and welcome your feedback on the change.

Our consultation is based on the budget consultation paper that was released by the Minister of Finance last week. There are copies of this paper available at the back for anyone interested in reading it.

We’ve been touring all over the province to listen to British Columbians about their ideas for the provincial budget. In addition to these meetings, we invite British Columbians to provide their thoughts in writing or by filling out the on-line survey. Details are available at the website at www.leg.bc.ca/cmt/finance. The deadline for input is 5 p.m., Friday, June 28, 2019.

We take all of the input that we receive and we carefully consider this — the committee does — to develop recommendations to the Legislative Assembly on what should be in the next provincial budget. Our report will be available in late July or early August. I would like to express my appreciation for everyone who took the time today to come out and share their thoughts with us.

As far as the format, I’d kindly ask that everyone presenting follow the following time limits. Each presenter will have five minutes to share their input, followed by five minutes for questions from the committee. You’re more than welcome to provide any information that you are not able to share in your presentation in writing.

If there’s anyone who hasn’t registered in advance but would like to speak to the committee, please see Stephanie at the information table at the back, and she will accommodate you.

Today’s meeting is being recorded and transcribed. All audio from our meetings is broadcast live via our website, and a complete transcript will also be posted.

Now I’d like to start by having our members introduce themselves, starting with MLA Rich Coleman.

R. Coleman: I’m Rich Coleman. I’m the MLA for Langley East.

R. Leonard: I’m Ronna-Rae Leonard. I’m the MLA for Courtenay-Comox on Vancouver Island.

M. Dean: I’m Mitzi Dean. I’m the MLA for Esquimalt-Metchosin.

D. Clovechok: Doug Clovechok. I’m the MLA for Columbia River–​Revelstoke, out in the Kootenays.

N. Simons: Nicholas Simons, MLA for Powell River–​Sunshine Coast.

D. Ashton (Deputy Chair): Good afternoon. Dan Ashton, the MLA for Penticton.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Once again, I’m Bob D’Eith, MLA for Maple Ridge–​Mission.

I’d also like to thank the Parliamentary Committees Office. With us, assisting today, we have Susan Sourial and also Stephanie Raymond in the back. They do amazing work, and we’re very appreciative.

Also, we have with us Hansard Services. They record the proceedings. We have Steve Weisgerber and Amanda Heffelfinger from Hansard, plus the team back in Victoria. We’d just like to thank them for their hard work setting up and setting down and setting up and setting down and setting up and setting down — over and over again. Thank you very much.

First up we have Williams Lake and District Chamber of Commerce — Paul French.

If you wouldn’t mind coming up. Thanks for having us in your lovely town.

Now that she’s back…. Just before you start, Paul, I did want to mention that MLA Coralee Oakes, MLA for Cariboo North, is here with us.

Thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate it. And it’s a beautiful town, Quesnel.

Okay, Paul, the floor is yours.

Budget Consultation Presentations

WILLIAMS LAKE AND DISTRICT
CHAMBER OF COMMERCE

P. French: I’m Paul French, representing the Williams Lake and District Chamber of Commerce. For your privy, I am the first vice-president of the USW Local 1-2017 and a member of the chamber.

[4:05 p.m.]

I’m here kind of with two hats. I volunteered to do this, basically, for the shock input, I guess, to let you know how I feel about what’s going on — and our members.

Two issues only that I’ll be talking about. One is the concerns with the health sector. The second one, of course, is dear to my heart. It’s the forest sector.

First off, the real inadequacies, I guess, of the health budget. Our big concern…. As a union rep, we actually have care aides that we look after in Williams Lake and 100 Mile, which kind of fall outside of the umbrella of the big health circle. So I actually was asked to talk about the health science professionals.

One of the big impacts in Williams Lake is we have the child development centre. The child development centre runs a number of programs through that organization. They deal with autism. They deal with speech therapy. They deal with brain injuries — all kinds of issues like that. They basically get funding, but everything else is kind of outside the envelope with donations, etc.

Personally, I’ve had a granddaughter that had a head injury that went through that system. Now, where I have a problem with the funding is it needs to be in all sectors, not just if you’re a union person or if you happen to belong to an association that you’re going to get a pocket more of money than anybody else. It needs to be balanced throughout all of the facilities.

With the child development centre, they went out and recruited a speech therapist, got her trained. They spent about $10,000 on that. She worked less than a month and went across the street to the First Nations health community, at $7 an hour more.

We deal with the care aides. Their wage is quite nominal compared to nurses or whatever. We had an issue where our Deni House, which is a care facility — they’re like $5 an hour more. Both union, but one gets benefits; one doesn’t. It’s not a fair system.

Somehow or another, when funding comes in, we can’t just have: “This pool of money is going here, because we think it’s better.” I think that there needs to be accountability on administration costs. There needs to be accountability on service delivery. When you’re paying wages, the wages need to be compatible — but also, what that overall flux of money coming in should be. It should be balanced. It should be equitable, not just catered to one group, one association, etc. It’s got to be across the board. I believe that’s what the original intent of combining it all in one group in the first place was, to try to have that balance.

A little poke is you have a publicly funded facility for, say, taking care of seniors. This is in the wage bracket that they get. You go across the road to the private facility, and the wage bracket there is even less.

All I’m asking for as a recommendation is: look, you got to look at the picture to be fair, equitable and basically try to come with equality so that services aren’t eroded from one just to better another one, especially like with the child development centre. It’s been there for 30 to 40 years, so it’s a pretty important milestone in our community.

That’s my pitch on that. I think I got a minute left now. The issues on forestry. Well, I guess none of us know what’s going on. We just know the result of what’s happening. We have mill closures — it seems like they’re being announced daily — or curtailments. Twenty years ago, it came out loud and clear about the annual allowable cut going to be reduced. There were the coalitions that were created. I was involved with the one with Mayor Rick Gibson at the time in Williams Lake. There were three of them, I believe, across the province.

Now here we are today, some 15 years later, and nothing came of that little group. The politicians kind of…. No pun to a politician — I used to be one. But it was taken over, and nothing came of it. No jobs were created or substantial jobs to take over.

I guess the question out here is: the forest companies in the province of British Columbia were the lowest-cost producers, and now they’re the highest-cost producers. I know the formula has changed, but we have the medical premiums kicking in. We’ve had the results of the wildfires. We’re dealing with the land claims. There’s always the fear of the softwood lumber agreement that is there and has been there for a long time. But anything we do on one side seems to impact on that end.

[4:10 p.m.]

Species at risk just come through the province here big time a little while ago. I’ll always throw this one at everybody. Administration always seems to be a problem. And then there are taxes.

That all is a counter to what’s happening. But at the end of the day, changes are going to happen. Changes need to happen. We just need to embrace it. We need to make sure that what is coming down or what is going on is explained and can be justified.

Right now no one seems to know. We just know the fires, market costs and logs. Everyone’s kind of sitting there. I think the government really needs to come up with a plan on how they can mitigate to get back to competitive, producing companies. We need jobs.

That would be my presentation.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Any questions from the members?

P. French: I either overwhelmed you or didn’t say a thing.

N. Simons: I understand the issue around the sudden difference in wages, because those who belong to a labour organization negotiated — collective bargaining — and got a low-wage redress. That has created some issues in the sector that are, I think, currently being addressed by government. Government’s engaging in discussions about that.

So yeah, we can poke. We can suggest that this is a problem. Obviously we don’t want to see…. We also recognize that some people are represented by labour and some aren’t. Teachers in one sector, privately, earn less or differently than the public sector. We see that differences exist. But obviously we need to continue to address that. I’m quite sure, because I’ve been told, that the province is continuing to engage with the sector, and the minister is actively involved in those discussions.

I’ll just say that to start.

P. French: Just in that, our union looks after the home support services. I think there’s only one other private union that does. Our care aides are about $5 an hour less than your HEU, our counterparts. Inequities are in that, as well as private. That’s where I’m trying to point my finger. Look at all, not just: “Oh, this group did a good job.” Now, don’t get me wrong. If one group is providing a service that’s really good, then there’s got to be a reason for that, and you need to look at the one that’s not.

Anyway, that’s sort of my concern.

D. Ashton (Deputy Chair): Paul, thanks for your presentation. I’m a staunch advocate. I have a family member in a home right now where…. I’ll call them facilities where Interior Health runs their own. The pay scale difference — same union, not the same collective agreement, though — is $5 to $6 an hour more, plus the benefits.

It worked X amount of years ago, where there were more and more people in the workforce. It’s not working now. Consequently, last weekend, there was one girl for 40 residents overnight in a particular facility. That doesn’t cut it. What has to happen is…. I’m glad to hear that my peer Nicholas…. I’ve been told that the minister is looking at it, and the seniors advocate is well aware of it, but there needs to be some form of levelling of the water here.

P. French: In that end, what needs to happen is to get back to the formula of so many hours per patient.

D. Ashton (Deputy Chair): Well, they have a 3.38, but it’s not happening.

P. French: Well, that’s low. We looked after a facility, and the problem is, if you’ve got a bad mess here, it takes away from there, because the manager is guided by those numbers. That’s where the problem comes in. It looks really good on paper, but in reality, it doesn’t necessarily flow, because each patient isn’t the same. That’s what I’ve noticed, and I have a father-in-law that’s in a home right now. When he’s sleeping, he gets excellent care. When he’s awake, they’re all awake. Anyway, I think you get it.

D. Ashton (Deputy Chair): We do. The louder the voices that are saying what we are saying, the quicker there will be some resolve. It will take the families.

P. French: I’ll speak louder.

D. Ashton (Deputy Chair): Thank you, though, for your presentation.

[4:15 p.m.]

B. D’Eith (Chair): One of the other problems with wages in that sector, too, and we’ve heard this before, is attracting and retaining good people to work in that area, and working conditions as well. There are a lot of issues.

Thank you very much, Paul, for your presentation. Really appreciate it.

Next up we have B.C. Wildlife Federation, region 5 — Kenneth Last.

Kenneth, if we could try and keep the initial comments to about five minutes so that we have time for questions, that would be wonderful. Thanks.

B.C. WILDLIFE FEDERATION,
REGION 5 CARIBOO

K. Last: My name is Ken Last. I’m the president of region 5 of BCWF, which is the Cariboo.

First of all, I’d like to thank the committee for the opportunity to address the Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services. My members hope you will appreciate the merits of their concerns.

The British Columbia Wildlife Federation is the oldest conservation organization, with approximately 45,000 members provincewide. We believe in science-based decision-making as a key tool to manage our resources.

We wish to point out the wildlife resource, including fish, as an integral part of the lifestyle for many residents. There are families that strictly rely on fish and wildlife for food, and this is a long-standing tradition. This was recognized as a principle for discussion in the region 5 round table on moose. In the Cariboo region, many residents feel the province is managing fish and wildlife populations to zero.

Examples. The mountain caribou population in the Itcha Ilgachuz has declined from a population of 2,800 animals to a current population of 640. Cariboo-Chilcotin moose populations have declined by an estimated 50 percent to 70 percent in the same time period.

Mule deer populations are declining. Resident hunters saw reduction in the bag limit of two bucks to a one-buck limit, along with a reduction in the provincial mule deer bag limits. There is also a corresponding reduction in limited-entry permits for antlerless mule deer, due to low populations.

The loss of wild sheep harvesting opportunities for several herds in management unit 53. Chilcotin steelhead are nearing extinction. Fewer than 100 fish returned to spawn from historic levels of 3,000 to 4,000 fish, despite concerns being raised by First Nations and resident anglers.

Recently I participated in the Cariboo moose solutions round table, hosted by the Tsilhqot’in First Nation and the provincial government. The following is from the facilitators of the meeting.

In the three recommendations, one was to plan and undertake access management, especially for non-status roads, combined with forest licensing, road deactivation and habitat restoration. Develop a multifaceted, integrated approach to understanding and addressing predator impacts on prey while also improving habitat. There is a strong desire for timely action on reducing impacts from predators. Enhance population assessment methods to include Indigenous and local data sources and develop a common and accessible information platform to inform decisions.

These three recommendations were endorsed by all attendees. To date, no action has been taken on the recommendations. Several of these recommendations are part of wildlife management. The province needs to step up to the plate. First Nations’ frustration in a lack of wildlife management is evident by blockades and other civil disobedience because of declining wildlife population.

The fact remains that if we grow moose and other wildlife populations, then the conflict between stakeholders should disappear. A key component in the current state of wildlife management in region 5 is the need for sufficient and sustainable funding for wildlife management over time. There needs to be consistent and adequate funding provided. British Columbia needs to have dedicated funding for wildlife management.

Other jurisdictions have all implemented dedicated funding, and our province is falling behind. An example to consider is the state of Alaska, which recognized the needs of residents to access wildlife for food. The Alaska state subsistence act provides for their resident needs. It provides for reasonable funding and recognizes and guarantees the right of all Alaskans to hunt, fish and forage for food.

[4:20 p.m.]

Wildlife in British Columbia belongs to all the residents of the province, and the provincial government has an obligation to provide fish and wildlife for all residents to use. My members feel that the province has forgotten that many residents harvest wildlife to feed their families. It is imperative that data be collected on both ungulates and predators to make well-informed decisions and management plans for all species. There must be an effort to monitor the impacts on the land base from development.

The lack of investment in our wildlife resource has led to the current state, where wildlife has been negatively impacted through all regions. Lack of dedicated sufficient funding for fish and wildlife management has gotten us into the above situation. Please review Trends in Renewable Resource Management in B.C., 2014 — Archibald, Eastman and Nyberg. The document is still relevant.

British Columbia has gone from the best-managed wildlife jurisdiction in Canada to one of the poorest. The solution is simple for Indigenous and non-Indigenous residents. There needs to be real investment in wildlife management for our great province. Our residents are concerned that if changes are not made to wildlife management, the federal government will assume jurisdiction and direct management of wildlife under the provisions of the Species at Risk Act, such as they have threatened to do with the mountain caribou.

I have some recommendations. To help reverse the current declines in wildlife, a provincial wildlife committee be established with input from all stakeholders to provide advice to the minister responsible for wildlife policy issues and on expenses from a dedicated fund. This should be a permanent wildlife management fund established to support wildlife management activities by the province, the private sector and First Nations.

My members feel that it’s essential to have the following three principles apply to a wildlife management fund. Those who actually contribute funds should have a say in how the funds are allocated and should receive clear information on how these funds are spent.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Ken, we’re at about six minutes now.

I want to say to the committee: do you mind if Ken just keeps going? I’m worried that we won’t have any question time. We’re okay?

Just keep going, Ken.

K. Last: I’m just about done.

The allocating funds must be transparent, accountable and will be subject to freedom-of-information requests. First Nations must be included in the allocations in their role as wildlife and habitat managers. Currently 100 percent of freshwater fishing fees are dedicated and divided between Habitat Conservation Trust Foundation and the Freshwater Fisheries of British Columbia, whereas only a very small portion of hunting licence fees and limited-entry applications are allocated to the Habitat Conservation Trust Foundation.

We propose that all hunting licence fees, species authorization tags and limited application fees be dedicated to fund wildlife management. Anglers and hunters also contribute to the regional and provincial economy by purchasing boats, vehicles, motel stays, food, fuel and hunting gear. We do not believe the province recognizes these expenditures or connects them to hunting and fishing activities.

The continued decline in opportunities has a direct impact on the economics of the province in the Cariboo region, where my members reside. There needs to be an overview process for resource extraction and the impacts of such activities on fish and wildlife be considered before extraction permits are granted. There should be a follow-up at the completion.

I have directed my remarks primarily to the Cariboo-Chilcotin region and the situation as it currently exists. My membership is frustrated and concerned, as are Indigenous people, due to the lack of wildlife management. It is plain that the province wants healthy, expanded fish and wildlife populations. More funding is required, since fish and wildlife funding has lagged behind all other provincial ministries for many years.

Please remember that both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities rely on these natural resources. I’ve listed the references.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Thanks so much, Ken. Now we only have maybe a couple of minutes for questions.

N. Simons: I just want to thank you for your presentation, and your colleagues throughout the province who have done a really good job of expressing the urgency of this issue and the fact that it’s not a new issue but one that’s obviously current and needs to be addressed. So I thank you very much for making a good case for improved funding. We’ve heard about options of licence fees being directed or increased. There have been all sorts of options being put forward, but the issue is clear.

D. Clovechok: Thank you, Ken, for your presentation. It’s an important one. One of the things that I personally found — this is the first time that we’ve heard this at this table — is how important harvesting of wildlife is for feeding families and how many families, not only in your region but in my region in the Kootenays, depend on taking an animal to feed their family over the winter. So that’s a very important point that you make there.

[4:25 p.m.]

You talked about the tags and everything going into a body. Can you just really quickly maybe give me a vision of what that management structure would look like?

K. Last: Well, it would be mostly stakeholders. It could operate under the Societies Act, similar to the Habitat Conservation Trust Foundation.

D. Clovechok: Thank you.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Thank you very much, Ken. We really appreciate it.

Next up we have Canadian Taxpayers Federation — Kris Sims.

Hi, Kris. How are you?

K. Sims: Hello. It’s not my official comment, but I grew up on hunted meat myself — moose meat, deer. Lots of good B vitamins in there. That was a very interesting presentation.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Kris, just a reminder — if we can keep the initial comments to about five minutes, I’d appreciate that.

K. Sims: It’s my goal to not be cut off for time this time. I’m sorry for babbling on.

B. D’Eith (Chair): No problem.

CANADIAN TAXPAYERS FEDERATION

K. Sims: I’ll be very quick, and then we can go to questions. Perfect.

Thank you very much for having me up here. Thank you, also, for taking the time to travel throughout this absolutely gorgeous province. I can see that you guys have your luggage ready to go as soon as you’re done here. So we appreciate the time that you put in. We just finished driving up, actually, from the Fraser Valley the other day. I think it’s important to talk directly with the communities that are affected by how and why we spend our taxpayer dollars. So I really appreciate your time.

I’ll go over my top five very briefly, and then I’ll open it up for questions.

(1) As always, please balance the budget. We were very pleased to see balanced budgets the last couple of budgets. That was really nice to see — and getting rid of operating debt. It’s important for taxpayers to know that governments and politicians take their money seriously, the same way they hopefully try to at home. So they don’t overspend what they take in.

One of our cautions and concerns there, though, is that the actual debt is still going up. We understand that a lot of times folks will say: “Well, we’re making investments. We’re paying for big things.” We get that. We know that needs to be paid for. But you also need to eventually pay that debt down. So having a plan somehow to tackle the actual full debt of the province would be a very good step to go along with balancing your budget.

(2) Please cancel the B.C. carbon tax. We know that we’ve been asking for this year after year, and we find now that we look across Canada and we see elected governments of places like Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and now even New Brunswick fighting against a carbon tax that was modelled after British Columbia’s carbon tax.

We think that speaks volumes. The fact that it’s no longer even kind of accounted for in the budget and no longer even called revenue neutral is becoming an increasing problem, especially for B.C. taxpayers who are finding it difficult now to heat their homes and to fill up their vehicles to go get their groceries, to drop their kids off at school.

(3) Cancel the employer health tax. We’re hearing a lot from not just job creators and businesses but actually from municipalities, from mayors and councils saying: “Wow. This has been downloaded now onto the backs of local government.” Because a lot of times it’s easy for them to get over a payroll of $500,000, and — bingo — now they’re having to pay the EHT.

I actually was speaking with a lady in Prince George who was already kind enough to be paying the MSP for her employees. Now she’s paying the MSP, the employer health tax, the physical taxes on her building, because she’s a small business in Prince George, and her home taxes are going up. All because of one decision, she’s getting quadruply taxed. This is becoming an increasing burden for these folks who are reaching out to us.

(4) Please open ICBC up to competition. We know that your Finance Minister has mentioned that it’s a fiscal risk or a financial risk to the province. You have to account for it every single budget. We agree. We know it won’t happen overnight, but we want to start the journey now.

Please transition ICBC into a co-op so it’s owned by the drivers who choose to use it, and then open it up to competition. That does two great things. It opens it up to competition to allow drivers to shop around for lower rates, and it stops ICBC from being used as a piggy bank or an ATM. You no longer would need to deal with it in the same manner that every single successive government has had to deal with ICBC. So we think that’s a good suggestion as a way of trying to save money and help the people who drive.

[4:30 p.m.]

Lastly — this is a big one, especially with yesterday’s announcement — please start supporting the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion. Do so effectively, thoroughly and carefully, but please do so. We’ve heard time and again from the courts and from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, through the federal government, that this is an important project. There has been consultation for several years. We really want it built.

To the point on budgets. It was fascinating to see just how much taxpayer dollars are being left on the table in the form of revenue, federally alone. We used the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s own numbers. We took that office’s numbers. Between 2013 and 2023, the federal government alone is losing out on nearly $13 billion. That’s just federally.

If you took a look municipally and provincially, it’s even more. To put that amount of money in perspective, that would employ — I think it was — 26,000 new teachers in B.C. for ten years. It would build something like six Pattullo bridges or nine St. Paul’s hospitals. That’s just a heck of a lot of money to be leaving on the table. All that is, is tax revenue. That wasn’t even the salaries that the folks would be making. That wasn’t even the property taxes that these businesses would be paying.

Even if you look at it purely from a tax and fund perspective, we think it’s very important to finally get behind this now doubly approved federal infrastructure.

Thank you very much. I didn’t get cut off, and I’m happy to take questions.

B. D’Eith (Chair): I just wanted to clarify a couple of things. Does the Canadian Taxpayers Federation have a position on the MSP premiums as a tax and that it was cut? The fact that that’s going away and that there’s another tax, the EHT, replacing that but not covering the $800 million…. It’s a big tax cut. What is the position on MSP premiums? I’m just curious about that.

K. Sims: My predecessor was against the MSP. That was why we were really happy to hear, during the last election, that it was going to be gotten rid of. I hope that we had spoken directly about that, that we wanted the MSP gone. Not only was it a burden for some folks to pay, but it was actually becoming a burden to administrate and to chase people down to try to get them to pay their bill. It was becoming really unwieldy. That’s why we thought it was a good idea to get rid of it.

What we didn’t know was that it was going to be replaced eventually by the EHT, the employer health tax.

B. D’Eith (Chair): My question is: if you take a big chunk of money out, then what is the Taxpayers Federation thinking about? How do you replace it?

K. Sims: How do you replace it? Well, for one, you could start taking…. If you approved the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, you could probably be taking taxpayer revenue out of that. There are all sorts of ways of actually saving money. Of course, it’s: “Don’t spend money on the needless stuff.” Get back down to the major stuff. Major stuff is definitely health care. Take a look at your budget elsewhere and put money in from there.

We already pay an enormous amount of money in taxes federally, municipally and provincially. We think that British Columbians are taxed enough, and putting it on to both job creators and municipal governments now, who are having to ding their local property tax payers…. We don’t think that’s fair.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Thank you.

N. Simons: Thank you very much. We’ve been listening to presentations. I think we are up to 190 presentations from people across this province — this beautiful province, as you called it. We’ve heard about the desperate need for housing, the desperate need for better care, the desperate need in all sectors.

What I tend to hear from you — I don’t know who your members are, and I don’t know where you get your funding, so it’s usually from you — is that we need to cut taxes, and taxes are bad.

We share the cost of the public infrastructure that we need to build. We just heard this morning about the need for improved roads for the energy sector. Yes, we do. But we need to find ways to pay for it. What I hear from you is usually to just cut the taxes as if that’s going to really resolve issues.

How do you square that circle?

K. Sims: Not absolutely everything needs to come from government.

N. Simons: What are the needless things that you think we are spending on?

K. Sims: Off the top of my head…. I forget how much you’re spending on it. More than $1 million touring the province to find out if we should have a guaranteed annual income, when we know for a fact that that doesn’t work. It’s been tried in western countries before. It’s things like that. If you add up those little projects you guys keep doing…. It all adds up.

You laugh, but take a look at household budgets, for example. If you continuously, constantly keep eating out at the restaurant, you’re going to wind up deep in the red. To flip it over, then, what’s the ultimate answer? If everybody comes to you with a reason for needing money, and you say yes to all of it, who is going to eventually pay that bill? What happens if we are taxed more than 100 percent?

N. Simons: We don’t say yes to everything, and you know that just a silly thing to say.

[4:35 p.m.]

The fact is that in 2001, there was the institution of a 25 percent personal income tax cut. That’s why we don’t have the kind of protections of wildlife that we used to have. That’s why we have the homeless situation.

K. Sims: Why don’t you take the gentleman’s suggestion from the hunting fees and the fishing regulations and the licensing fees and put it directly into wildlife habitat restoration and protection?

N. Simons: I’m just glad you’re not writing government policy. That’s all.

K. Sims: Likewise.

D. Clovechok: Well, thank you very much, Kris, for your presentation — very thorough and, I think, very pointed. That comes, I think, from eating all that wild meat. It keeps your head nice and clear. It just goes to show you the…. And wildlife funding has nothing to do with this.

K. Sims: Oh, I know. But I actually appreciated the gentleman’s point of taking…. It makes sense. That seems fair to people. When they’re paying for a hunting licence, they like the idea that that hunting licence would go to protect the moose population.

D. Clovechok: Oh, for sure. Absolutely. I just wanted to say thank you for your presentation. We’re hearing from folks all across the province, and certainly in my own riding that I represent, that the taxes are having a real effect in a negative way on their livelihoods and their lifestyles. So thank you for coming up and being so honest.

K. Sims: Thank you. And to the point, W.A.C. Bennett — famous for many reasons…. One of the things he was famous for was, apparently — I wasn’t around at the time — personally negotiating major contracts, down to the quarter. Why is the Premier bothering talking about nickels and dimes and quarters? Because he cared, apparently, about taxpayer dollars. And if you take care of the little things, the big stuff adds up. It really does. If you take that approach to taxpayer dollars, you will wind up saving money.

That’s what we’re here for. We know that you have a lineup of folks who all plead a very good case and say what they need help for. We’re one of the only groups that say: “Please stop. Please slow down. Please figure out a way to do it differently.” They really respect that.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Well, we’re out of time, but thank you so much, Kris. We appreciate it.

K. Sims: Thank you very much for all of your time.

B. D’Eith (Chair): You bet.

Okay. Next up we have Literacy Quesnel Society — Rebecca Beuschel.

I’ll just wait till everyone has your handout. While we’re waiting, just a reminder — if we can keep the initial comments to about five minutes, that would be wonderful. Then we have time for questions. All right. Please go ahead.

LITERACY QUESNEL SOCIETY

R. Beuschel: Thank you. My name is Rebecca Beuschel. Thanks for coming to Quesnel to listen to people in our community speak about what matters to them. I work as the literacy outreach coordinator for a non-profit organization called Literacy Quesnel Society. Sometimes I need to qualify what that means, because it’s a little vague to be working in the literacy field.

Most people think that equates to teaching people how to read. There is some of that in what we do, but mostly we help people figure out what they need to do to increase their literacy levels and enhance their skills. Then we look for ways to help them enact that, which sometimes means we look for funding for ways to help them enact that.

Adults with limited literacy encounter barriers when they interact with the world. Low literacy leads to poorer health outcomes, fewer employment opportunities, limited social engagement. But probably the worst impact of all that I’ve seen is low self-esteem and people believing that they’re stupid, which is not my word.

It’s a word often said in the first interaction with us when people come into our literacy centre. They say things like: “I couldn’t read in school because I was stupid,” or “I think my teachers thought I was stupid, so I just never paid attention, and I became the class clown,” or “My dad told me I was stupid and made me drop out of school so I could help him.” These are 50-, 60-, sometimes 70-year-old people coming to us saying: “I actually can’t read,” or “I can’t write,” or “I can’t figure out how to email a photo to my kids.”

All these comments are said to me by people who have come into our literacy space to ask for help. Very often when adults come in for the first time, they ask us to help, in a quiet voice with a hunched posture, as though it’s a massive inconvenience and as though they don’t want to bother us, which is kind of heartbreaking. Then very quickly, they mention the “stupid” thing.

[4:40 p.m.]

Helping these adults and all people in our community is what we do. Beyond print literacy, people are required to have skills in oral communication, problem-solving, computer use, numeracy, continuous learning. Some people need access to resources like books and learning materials, some people need one-to-one help, some people prefer to have helping groups, and some people just need to be supported as they start on their learning journey. We do all of that on a budget of about $60,000 a year.

I say “we” because even though I’m the only paid employee at 20 hours per week, we hire people to fulfil our contractual obligations when we receive funding to implement specific programs. Otherwise, I’m kind of it. We have a bevy of volunteers who are amazing and dedicated. We could not manage to have the reach that we have without our volunteers. And we’re really grateful for the financial support provided by the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Advanced Education, Skills and Training and, of course, Decoda Literacy Solutions, which is our provincial literacy organization that receives funding from those two ministries.

Decoda is really the backbone of good literacy practice in B.C. They provide us with moral support, financial support, professional development support. It’s really important for groups like ours to have that, because we often work in isolation or in these weird things — this field that’s not really definable.

Literacy Quesnel is one of over 400 communities in B.C. working to develop and sustain literacy programs. The programs differ from community to community, which is a key factor for success. We’re able to respond to the unique needs of people in Quesnel and work within the parameters of what suits our community members and organizations, and the flexibility of that is really invaluable.

Collaboration is a priority for us, and we work really well with many groups in the community, including but not limited to WorkBC; the College of New Caledonia, specifically with the community adult literacy program; the child development centre; the early-years group; school district 28 — Fostering Literacy is one of the collaborative projects we have going on with them; the Quesnel and district public library; Northern Health — we have a Books for Babies program with them; the North Cariboo Aboriginal Family Program Society; and many more.

But we need stable and continuous funding. That’s my request. We need it to help our community and its members.

I work 20 hours per week, ten months of the year. I cut that down to ten hours a week in July and August so I don’t burn out the budget. We protect our finances. We were established in 2008, and I’ve been the literacy coordinator for 11 years. We’re creative in our methods of adding to the budget. We have a trivia night. We operate a used-book store. We go for small regional grants. We partner on things. But we really need a solid amount to provide a base for our activities, and we need to know that it’s coming — not “Let’s imagine that we don’t have it, so let’s put in a contingency fund because we might get cut.”

Currently the province provides about $2.1 million for, kind of, my position, literacy outreach coordination — there are 102 of us, I think, throughout the province — and $2.4 million for community adult literacy programs. We’re asking for an increase in these amounts to $3 million for literacy outreach coordination and to $4 million for the community adult literacy programs.

I would love to work myself out of a job. I say all the time that if I work myself out of the job, I’m the most successful person on earth. But the reality is that I could probably do it for a few lifetimes and not see an end. Many people are needing help and support, so it looks like I’ll be here for a while. But we need the funding to increase and then continue, please. And thank you. I appreciate having had the opportunity to be here and share a little bit of the literacy puzzle with you.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Okay. Thank you very much, Rebecca.

We’ve been hearing around the province, especially from non-profits and organizations, the need for flexibility so that you can tailor programs for specific communities and, also, this idea of stable and committed funding. Are you asking for multi-year funding so that you’re not always…?

R. Beuschel: Multi-year — like about 20.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Well, I don’t know if you’d ever get that, but you can ask for it. You can try for it.

M. Dean: Thanks for all your work. I worked closely with the literacy coordinator in our community for many years.

[4:45 p.m.]

I’m a bit concerned about what you’re saying about being around for so long. We’ve been investing in literacy programs, and my experience is that the literacy work is across the age range.

R. Beuschel: Yes.

M. Dean: So you’re catching people who, as you say, were hiding it for decades. And we know we want to invest in…. We have, like, Books for Breakfast. You get just one book in the household of a kid, and their trajectory for their educational results is really significantly improved.

Are we not moving the dial, or are we not measuring how we’re moving the dial? Or is it that we’re doing okay, and we just keep reaching for better targets?

R. Beuschel: Yes, I think it’s that. I think we are moving the dial, and I’ve seen it in Quesnel. But I think it’s one of those….

It’s such an intergenerational problem. If you were brought up with someone with low literacy, you pretty much have low literacy yourself. You don’t understand the importance of building your literacy skill. Even if you just scraped through school, you kind of think that’s enough, and that’s where you need to…. You’ve done okay, but you really need to continuously learn. You need to have that fostered in you, and you need to really understand that it should be part of your DNA to want to build your skills and reach for more.

I think the funding is fantastic, but it hasn’t changed in a long time, yet the need changes because different things happen. Mills close. Kids graduate school with questionable literacy skills. The workforce changes. You know, there’s more demand on computer literacy skills, or there’s more demand on how you understand problems. The world changes, so then we need to kind of move with it. Sometimes if you just remain at the same funded level, you can’t do other things that need to be done.

I love that our…. We get $27,000 a year from Decoda, and that’s our base funding, but that doesn’t cover what they pay me or our rent or our bills. It covers part of it, so then we have to kind of push things…. The one thing I never want to do in literacy is mandate chase — follow the money. Like, let’s do a swimming program and call it literacy because there’s $30,000 available for that. We can’t do that, and we can’t do it well. I’ve never seen it work really well past the first funding cycle.

So yeah, the demand increases. Not hugely and not for any one thing, but it does change and increase. And if the funding stays the same, then we have to say: “Well, this year we could do that, but we can’t do that. But that reached 12 kids who are now reading, and it’s fantastic because now their parents are coming and learning about how to teach them how to read. But we can’t do that. Let’s do this one instead.” We just hate to choose.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Of course.

Well, thank you very much, Rebecca, for your presentation. We appreciate it. Your commitment to literacy is wonderful.

R. Beuschel: You’re welcome. Thank you.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Next up we have the city of Quesnel — Mayor Bob Simpson.

Hello, Bob.

CITY OF QUESNEL

B. Simpson: Thank you, Chair.

I’m going to ask you not to be distracted by the great package that I put in front of you, because I’d like to engage us, and then I’ll speak to what that package is and you can take a look at it at your convenience. I also did do a written statement, but in order for us to have a bit of a dialogue, I’ll submit the written statement and just truncate it so that I can get into the meat of what I want to say.

The substance of the written statement is that we didn’t have to be in crisis mode. We didn’t. This was a known event. The mill closures was a known event from 2002 on, when the mountain pine beetle curve went like this. Every jurisdiction that has had a pest infestation to that degree has been followed by catastrophic wildfires, and we are now in a situation….

In 2010, predictions of actual mill closures were tabled with the government of the day, and they chose to do nothing to prepare us for that. So here we are, in a situation where the city of Quesnel, over the last 4½ years, has been preparing for a transition that was a known event.

[4:50 p.m.]

We used to have five forest products companies operating in our community. We now have two, with one of them being the company, West Fraser. They’re a great corporate citizen. They’re an active partner with us. But they control almost all of the volume in our timber supply area, and they employ almost all of the employees that work in our city, with the exception of C&C Wood Products.

Two mills closed during the last administration, and this year we will be losing another 210 jobs with the closure of the Tolko mill and the loss of a permanent shift at the West Fraser sawmill. Our concern now is that the next phase of these closures will be the residuals businesses — pulp, power, MDF, pallets — because as the sawmills footprint gets smaller, there’s less of those residuals. The business case for those other companies also goes down.

So we have to be in a transition mode, and that’s what I want to speak more about: what we’re doing as a community in transition.

In 2014, we decided to embark on a really aggressive transition strategy that has a number of fronts to it. The new council — I have three new council members as of the last election — have committed to continuing on that aggressive strategy.

The first thing we did was concentrate on our own fiscal sustainability. We did a 10 percent operating reduction of costs over two years. At the end of the day, there was a 0.5 FTE that we lost, beyond attrition. We repurposed programs. We moved people around. We were able to achieve those cost savings.

We addressed an accruing infrastructure deficit of $2.4 million per year. That was for core infrastructure — roads, sidewalks, water, sewer, etc. — with two 5 percent tax increases back to back when we weren’t taxing for operating. No inflationary pressures whatever — we just did two back-to-back 5 percent lifts.

We also froze industrial taxes. We came out with a four-year framework, and we went to the public and said: “This is what’s going to happen over the term of this municipal government, not lurching year to year.” In there, we did a three-year tax freeze for industry. If we had not done that, then the loss of the Tolko mill would have been a catastrophic property tax loss to us. Because we did do that, we’ve mitigated that loss in advance of a known entity.

The city of Quesnel, at one point, got 71 percent of its tax base from industry. Our residents only paid 19 percent. Our residents still only pay 22 or 23 percent, but that’s after a 28 percent tax lift to residents here because of shifting that burden over to them. So we’ve done that work.

The other piece that we’ve done is we’ve gotten very good at getting any grants that are available to us, because we decided that we had to play that game. We have a grant writer. We administer those grants. We have projects that are ready to get in the window when we get the three months — you know, when you’ve got to apply. We’ve been really successful. I think, all in, we’re approaching $20 million that we’ve brought into the community over the last little while in those grants. I’m going to speak about what’s wrong with those grant programs in a minute.

The other thing we did was amenities investments. What we said was that the taxpayers are going to bear the burden of this — residential taxpayers. They need to see the investments. We did a direct correlation between shifting the tax base and investing in the community. We invested in every neighbourhood. We’ve reinvested in all our playgrounds, amenities and buildings like this. We now call taxation your contribution to your community, so people can actually see what they’re contributing to. We make sure that they know what services they’re getting delivered for that approximately $200 a month that they’re paying towards the municipal services.

The second piece was we did a complete rebranding. That’s where this package fits in. We were known as the Gold Pan City. We had a gold pan logo, where every extractive industry was coming out of the gold pan. Try and recruit new workers and new health care professionals — people who are interested in nature not being exploited but being lived in and enjoyed — with that kind of logo.

We found that in our doctor recruitment strategy. We were going to lose nine doctors. We ended up mounting a strategy that recruited over 13 doctors plus specialists, opening up a new primary care clinic, and we learned how to brand and talk about our community differently through that initiative. We won two awards for that. We can claim now that anybody that comes into Quesnel can get a family doctor, which most communities can’t claim. So we rebranded, and the material you see here.

[4:55 p.m.]

We also embarked on an aggressive community marketing strategy — marketing the community for itself as a livable, affordable community. Where I live, up in Southhills, I’m now surrounded by Lower Mainland refugees who have cashed out from unaffordable communities and are living here with big bank accounts. For many of them, it doesn’t matter where they live, because their work is either on-line or away. So we’ve become a community that becomes a preferred community for them.

We have a new website, a social media presence. We’re now a hosting community. We hosted the B.C. Men’s and Women’s Curling Championships in this venue. For the first time ever, the men were outside the Lower Mainland. They’re now talking to us about hosting an international event in this venue.

We were able to get grant funding to tie the three buildings in this precinct together, and we won the Minerals North event for 2020. We think we can come in at that midstream.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Bob, we’re at about seven minutes now. I just want to make sure we have time for questions.

B. Simpson: Oh, sorry. I didn’t realize I was that long. Okay.

Then finally, we have a natural resource strategy, looking at all the resource sectors. But one of the things we deliberately did is that we have a future forestry think tank strategy where we want to be the hub of innovation in forestry and reinventing that sector. We don’t want to walk away from it.

The four things I’ll leave with you quickly.

First, we need flexible funding from the provincial and federal governments. We need you to fund our plan, not force us to fund what your desires are for us through application processes.

Second, we need dependable, year-over-year infrastructure funding — not for core infrastructure but for the infrastructure where demands are put on us because provinces and federal governments change their standards. For example, right now, manganese standards have changed. That’s an $18 million bill for us to go to water treatment.

Third, we need more mental health…. We need more addictions services, and we need more housing. The number one stumbling block for us achieving our aspirations is that we don’t have enough services for those in need in our community.

Then the fourth is that we need more resources now for emergency preparedness and evacuation services. We have to move away from the volunteer base to something that’s more consistent, year over year.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Any questions at all?

I was just curious…. Oh, sorry. I didn’t see any hands go up.

Go ahead, Mitzi.

M. Dean: Thanks for your presentation, Your Worship. What you started off by saying was that you could see, from the outset, the trajectory of what was going to happen. Now you’ve come in at a certain point in that trajectory. Where do you see your interventions…? What are you basing those on? How are you measuring them? Can we transfer those to other communities in B.C., for example?

B. Simpson: I’ll answer the last question first. You can transfer the process and the intent of developing a comprehensive vision to any community anywhere, based on their strengths, based on their need. You can’t transfer the exact strategy we’ve got, because we have different strengths and we have different needs, right? But it’s that idea of local leadership having a vision.

For example, I’ve had conversations with the mayor in 100 Mile House. We’ve always suspected 100 Mile House would come out of this with no mills. I had that conversation with him five years ago. So where’s the game plan that should be in place, based on that community’s strengths and needs, to be prepared for that inevitability? That’s really the challenge.

That’s where, I think, the provincial and federal government funding, as for our plans, will stimulate that kind of behaviour, because a lot of the time, in local governments, is spent filling in applications for somebody else’s idea of what we should be doing.

We are measuring this, all of our website metrics. We can measure how many housing units. We’re trying to measure how many people are actually relocating into our community. All of those. We are trying to track this from a metric perspective so we understand whether we’re being successful or not.

B. D’Eith (Chair): I have a quick question for you in regards to…. If people, if a mill closes…. You say you already have some plans for those workers. Can you maybe tell us a little bit more about that?

B. Simpson: We’re trying to. The juxtaposition of people who have long-term jobs in milling environments, which are now, basically, optimized processing — I come out of the forest sector; I spent ten years as a corporate manager in that sector — and then shifting them mostly back to physical labour–type jobs is not an easy transition to do. The younger part of that workforce, you can target. The older part of that workforce, you have to have different strategies for — pension bridging, different kinds of strategies for that.

[5:00 p.m.]

We feel we’re going into a critical period of time where job vacancies are our limiting factor. We’re going to see the highest level of public and private sector investment in our community over the next five to eight years than we’ve ever seen. We’re getting no bids on some projects. We’re getting one bidder on a project, and we’re getting all of our contractors telling us they don’t have the bodies.

That’s what we have to take advantage of, and that’s where we need the flexibility from the provincial government on the kind of human resource programs they’ve got. They need to work with us to figure out how to deploy those.

The one example I’ll give you is that we have a full trades school at the College of New Caledonia here. West Fraser actually helps fund some of that. So we can offer our full suite of trades. Sometimes it’s hit-and-miss on whether you can run that program. We have one of those programs that doesn’t have all of their complement and aren’t at the cost-efficiency measure to run the program.

We’ve gone to the province and said: “Look, if we can get some Tolko folks to fill that program up so we can run it, will you fund it?” Well, the province’s job retraining program only funds full cohorts. They don’t buy bums in seats in existing programs. That’s the kind of issue that we’ve got to resolve so that we can do what we need to do.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Okay, great.

Oh, one last one. Just a quick one.

D. Ashton (Deputy Chair): Just real quick. Sir, thank you for your presentation. What are the tax ratios between residential and industrial — the differential?

B. Simpson: Are you talking about the percentage that we get?

D. Ashton (Deputy Chair): The percentage.

B. Simpson: Right now our residents are around the 23 percent mark.

D. Ashton (Deputy Chair): I heard that part of it. So for every dollar that you tax residences, how many dollars do you tax industry?

B. Simpson: Oh, you’re talking about the mill rate — that differential.

D. Ashton (Deputy Chair): Yeah, the differential rate.

B. Simpson: I think it’s 54 for…. I’d have to get….

D. Ashton (Deputy Chair): So 5.4 times?

B. Simpson: No. It’s $54. You asked the dollar ratio. I’ll get you that number…

D. Ashton (Deputy Chair): It would be appreciated. I was just curious.

B. Simpson: …because it has shifted over the last little while.

D. Ashton (Deputy Chair): Well, it would with that shift over to the residential.

B. Simpson: Absolutely. We’ve brought industry down to about 52 percent of our revenue, and the one that we’re tracking that we’re concerned about is our commercial that has also floated up with our residential. We need to make sure we’re not punishing them. But I don’t have the mill rates in my head. I’ll get you the mill rate.

D. Ashton (Deputy Chair): Okay. Just a spread, percentage-wise difference. Thank you.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Okay. Well, thank you very much, Your Worship. We really appreciate it.

B. Simpson: Thank you for your time.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Next up we have the B.C. ME/FM Society — Sheila Murland and Brian Murland.

Brian and Sheila, if we could keep the initial comments to about five minutes so we have time for questions, that would be wonderful.

MYALGIC ENCEPHALOMYELITIS
AND FIBROMYALGIA SOCIETY OF B.C.

S. Murland: I did send out some electronic stuff.

I’m Sheila Murland, and I’m here today to represent the ME/FM Society of B.C. and myself.

The ME/FM Society of B.C. is a B.C. charity formed to help and support patients with myalgic encephalomyelitis and/or fibromyalgia. They also work to bring ME and FM to the attention of health care workers, government officials and the general public. They currently receive no government funding that I’m aware of.

I am a long-term — approximately 22 years diagnosed — patient with ME. When I was initially diagnosed in 1998, the illness was termed chronic fatigue syndrome, CFS. A previous derogatory label from the 1980s was “yuppie flu.” Now it is often called ME/CFS, for those who don’t understand the neurological and immune basis of the illness. ME is not a rare disease. In B.C., as of 2015, there were estimated to be 77,000 people, with 560,000 spread across Canada. The numbers were determined by the Canadian community health survey in 2015.

ME can cause dysfunction of the neurological, immune, endocrine and energy metabolism systems. A primary symptom is post-exertional malaise, PEM. PEM is exhaustion after exertion. That can be physical, cognitive or emotional.

[5:05 p.m.]

PEM exhaustion is not defined as: “I need to have a nap.” PEM is similar to a marathon athlete who has hit the wall. The patient will have trouble standing, walking. They will have muscle spasms, muscle pain, nerve pain, headaches. They’ll have trouble constructing a simple sentence and choosing between two items and a multitude of other symptoms.

The dysfunction varies widely from patient to patient and even from day to day for an afflicted person. This often creates confusion and frustration for health care workers, family and the patient. Some people are able to continue earning an income and pay taxes, although it is often at reduced work hours and income.

For others, working is not an option, and they go from being a productive income earner to someone fighting to justify why they deserve disability benefits and medical assistance. For others, they have no option but to lay in a dark and quiet room and require assistance for basic functioning.

In Canada, at a symposium in 2003, with the support of Health Canada, the Canadian consensus criteria for diagnosing ME was developed by international ME experts. This globally accepted diagnostic criteria is used by doctors around the world. It is still unfamiliar to most Canadian doctors.

In Ontario in 2006, the Ontario Medical Association listed ME/CFS as a neurological illness and listed it with the diagnostic code 795. Having the code has helped some patients in Ontario but not solved the problem of lack of knowledge and public stigma in Ontario.

B.C. does not even have a diagnostic code for ME, so there is no means to truly track the illness, how much time doctors have to spend with an ME patient or how much cost there is to the medical system.

The lack of knowledge about myalgic encephalomyelitis or the Canadian consensus criteria increases the frustration and confusion for patients, doctors and family. It can take years to get a diagnosis, as general practitioners seeking to help the obviously ill patient sends them to specialist after specialist, chasing the source of the variety of diverse symptoms that this illness causes.

This creates a financial and use-of-time burden on the medical system. It also creates a financial and increased illness burden on the patient. The cost to get to these specialists can be prohibitive, especially for those of us who do not live near a large centre. Often the patients are so ill, they’re no longer able to earn an income and, until they have a diagnosis, are unable to receive disability benefits from either the government or their extended medical insurance provider, if they have one.

As a representative of the ME/FM Society of B.C. and a person with this illness, I would request that finances be designated to the following:

(1) develop a program aimed at members of the health care sector to address the lack of knowledge and awareness about myalgic encephalomyelitis and the Canadian consensus criteria among doctors and health care workers;

(2) create a provincial ME anti-stigma education and awareness campaign aimed at the general public, government officials and the health care sector;

(3) create a provincial government committee to assess the needs of the ME community; and

(4) provide support to organizations such as the ME/FM Society of British Columbia with resources so they can continue to supply direct support and advocacy for the ME community.

I believe that costs for awareness programs might be greatly reduced by using documents and videos that have already been created by ME societies, charities and researchers in Canada, the U.S.A, Australia and the U.K. I’ve listed them on the last page.

I believe that organizing the provincewide distribution of the information could save the medical system thousands of specialist and general practitioner visits and medical tests. It would also prevent well-meaning doctors prescribing outdated and disproven treatments, such as graded exercise therapy. This therapy has been proven to be harmful and actually causes an increase in symptoms.

[5:10 p.m.]

I believe that distributing information about the neurological illness of myalgic encephalomyelitis could save patients from the devastation that results when they face doctor after doctor who do not know why their muscles, nerves, minds and hormones no longer function as they did only months previously.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Thank you very much, Sheila. I appreciate you sharing your…. You know, coming here takes a lot of courage, and also advocating for this issue.

I just had one question in regards to doctors and not diagnosing this. I’m just wondering: how is the medical profession responding to these requests? Sometimes when we have presentations to our committee, it’s often being driven by physicians and things — that not enough is being done in this area. It sounds like not enough doctors are participating in this. I’m just curious why. Can you help me with that?

S. Murland: There’s no billing code. They can’t get paid for the time that it takes to deal with us.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Fair enough, right.

S. Murland: Why would you want to? They’re giving away their time.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Got it.

Any questions?

R. Coleman: Thanks, Sheila. I was familiar with fibromyalgia before I read your presentation, but it was a whole education, for me, on ME, to be honest with you.

A couple things that jumped out at me. The first one was that there was no billing code for ME. I get that when the doctor can’t figure out the specialists and where to bill to and whatever, then you’ve got a problem. I thought the home care eligibility criteria should be a concern. Financial support for patients and organizations…. The fact that you can’t get disability income because it’s tough to get the diagnosis because there’s no billing code…. You can’t actually get PWD or whatever, with regards to it, because you have to have the information, which all led me to concern. So obviously, we’ve got to pay some attention to this.

The second part, though, was — and maybe you can help me — you report that we have the highest prevalence of ME globally, in Canada, at 560,000 people. Have you got any information that can tell me why that is, in this country?

S. Murland: The researchers are tracking it down, but they’re believing it’s to do with our immune systems. Just as MS is an autoimmune disease, the research is indicating that ME is also going to be an autoimmune disease. Something in our lives has changed our genes — epigenetics — and those changes have affected our immune systems, which have affected virtually every system in our body.

R. Coleman: The difference with this disease seems to me…. MS — there’s usually an age bracket between where it’s onset, what have you. Same thing with Parkinson’s and others. This one doesn’t seem to be selective by age or race or anything.

S. Murland: If the immune system is hit hard, it doesn’t matter what age you are. You can be a child of six. You can be a person of 70.

R. Coleman: Okay. Well, thank you for that. I think we have some work to do.

R. Leonard: Thank you for your presentation and making the effort to come and speak with us today. Speaking of that and sort of the demographics, is it something that’s grown in the last decade, two decades, 50 decades?

S. Murland: I don’t know that it’s grown. ME is often clustered. There will be peaks in certain areas at certain times. There was one in Colorado. There was one in Montreal. There was one in London. There’s been in Scotland. There has been in Australia. There will be something that comes through, whether it’s a bad case of a virus that is common, and 20 Twenty people will get it, and 18 people will get well; two will be in their bedrooms for the rest of their lives.

D. Clovechok: Thank you very much for your presentation, Sheila. It’s certainly a learning experience for me because I’ve never heard of this before.

S. Murland: That’s part of our problem.

D. Clovechok: Part of the problem — exactly. I’m just wondering if you have any information about: is there any way of doing research on this, from a medical perspective — like a university or a medical…? Is there focused research being done into this malady?

[5:15 p.m.]

S. Murland: Yes. Around the world, actually — virtually nothing in Canada. At this time, there are some people in Calgary and somebody in Toronto that is working with some people in the U.S. Stanford is big.

One of the things I sent to you was called…. The ME/FM Society has created it. It’s called the Backgrounder. In there, it does talk about some of the research that is happening on what I included. There is the appendix. There is a list of ME societies.

The big one in the States is the Bateman Horne Center. They have actually created videos for training for doctors and health care people.

D. Clovechok: Are they gaining ground?

S. Murland: Yes. We’re getting very close to actually developing a biomarker, something that you can go to the doctor and the doctor can order a test for. For some researchers, they’re chasing inflammation in the brain. It will be an MRI that is specialized to pick up inflammation rather than lumps and bumps and tumours.

Others are chasing metabolites. The breakdown of cells in our body creates metabolites. They’ve located half a dozen that are specific for ME. They can tell the people with ME from the healthy people, but they have to get it out of the research lab, and they have to get it out to the public. That’s the next step. We’re getting close.

D. Clovechok: That’s encouraging. Thank you.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Nick, real short. We’re over time.

N. Simons: Just quickly. Thank you very much for being here. My presumption is that you have been diagnosed. I’m informed that people do get disability status in British Columbia without a code. What’s the code for, if doctors are giving the diagnosis?

S. Murland: If you have a code, chronic illnesses are allotted more time for the doctor to bill. Rather than a ten-minute visit, you might get a 15- or 20-minute visit because you have a chronic illness. That’s what the codes are about.

B. Murland: Your original question. You were talking about the doctors and the specialists. One of the problems is…. Our doctors are out there to help us as much as they can, but with this disease, it presents in so many different ways that you end up doing the battery. Like, when Sheila went through the process, she was diagnosed, and then she crashed again. We went through, and her doctor said that it looked like the chronic fatigue had returned at the levels of the crash.

We went through 17 specialists in 18 months. It was like: “Okay, well she’s presenting like MS.” So they sent her down there, and she got tested for that. She goes to this specialist and that specialist.

Then when it finally got diagnosed again as chronic fatigue, they billed against MS. They billed against this one. They billed against the nerve specialist that saw her.

S. Murland: The neurologist.

B. Murland: The neurologist and on and on and on. That’s part of….

S. Murland: When you talk about stigma, the first doctor that diagnosed me in ’98 — when we went back to him, when I crashed a second time in 2011 — actually denied having diagnosed me.

B. Murland: He said he wouldn’t have done that. Then we showed him the form that was signed by him.

S. Murland: We showed him the letter, the report that I had a copy of. He made us leave his office.

B. Murland: He asked us to leave.

S. Murland: He had nothing more to do with us.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Thank you very much, Sheila and Brian. Appreciate you coming in — really appreciate it.

We’ll take a five-minute recess.

The committee recessed from 5:19 p.m. to 5:28 p.m.

[B. D’Eith in the chair.]

B. D’Eith (Chair): We have with us the Seniors Advocacy Service — Susan MacNeill. We also have Ruth Scoullar.

Thank you so much, both of you, for coming. If we could try to keep the initial comments to about five minutes, then we’ll have a chance to ask questions.

SENIORS ADVOCACY SERVICE

S. MacNeill: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank you very much for the opportunity to present once again. We haven’t presented to the committee since 2012.

Changes in public policy towards seniors have driven many communities to engage in programs of advocacy and self-help. While these changes have forced seniors to band together for a common cause, it has also reinforced the need to develop solidarity amongst themselves.

The Seniors Advocacy Service was community-driven into operation on a formal basis in May of 2004. We’ve expanded our office four times now to accommodate the needs of the community. This office maintains a roster of trained volunteers to assist seniors with referrals to agencies and consultations for practical advice in a safe, secure and comfortable environment.

We foster a shared commitment with other organizations in our community to cultivate awareness of community-based challenges and contribute to helping others solve problems. We are a candle in the wind for our seniors issues that needs not to go out. We have facilitated several seniors forums, lunchtime workshops and interactive seminars since our inception.

[5:30 p.m.]

Prior to the Northern Health Authority travel program, we had successfully developed a transportation pilot project, which enabled seniors to travel to out-of-town medical appointments at no charge to the patient. This program is still operating today. We provide the disabled parking permit program, with the approval of SPARC B.C., the endorsement of city hall and the support of the Advocacy Resource Centre for the Cariboo.

We believe our office is very much a necessity to our seniors, as the liaison with municipal, provincial and federal governments. We believe that this office plays an important role in each of the strategic goals of our community, as we share the view that innovation is essential to improving the social and economic performance of society. We would like to participate in ongoing communication and consultation and efforts to ensure that decisions respond to those priorities.

We value a community that has a sense of purpose and engages in a grassroots effort from all its stakeholders. It is imperative that we continue to cultivate a diverse leadership in our community, as this takes on a role of responsibility and accountability to ensure that communities can reach their full potential. We know that seniors are a valuable resource, sharing their skills, their knowledge, their life experience and contributing their energy and commitment to helping build our vibrant communities.

We are not funded in any way, but we do seek out opportunities when available and appropriate. Offices that were once funded by government need to be funded once again. We know that quality of life and access to services are critical to seniors. We would prosper with more hours in our office and with a paid position. Our volunteers are wearing out, and as you can tell from Ruth and me, we’ve earned these gray hairs, but there’s going to be a time when we won’t be here.

We know, too, that by supporting older adults to stay healthy, active and independent, we are benefiting all British Columbians. Our newest program has just launched. You have the brochure. It’s Life After 60: Seniors Living Well. We are stepping it up where health care ends to meet the life-functioning needs of seniors in our community. We expect to be provincewide within three years.

For your consideration tonight, we are asking for seniors advocate offices to be funded once again across the province so we may further our benefits to seniors.

We respectfully submit this submission.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Thank you.

Just before we open the questions to the other members, I’m just curious. Did you have an idea of what that would cost in terms of that funding?

S. MacNeill: Yes, we do. We’re looking at $1,000 a month.

B. D’Eith (Chair): No, no. I mean, you said for the whole province.

S. MacNeill: Oh, for the whole province. Back in the day when they were all funded, there were 54 separate Seniors Advisory Councils in all of B.C.

R. Leonard: What year?

S. MacNeill: Prior to 2001, there were 54 Seniors Advisory Councils.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Is there a similar number now?

S. MacNeill: No, there’s not.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Is that because of funding, or is that because they’re getting advocacy from other areas?

S. MacNeill: Part of it is because of funding. Lots of us have been community driven, actually, to create a service. There are lots of seniors activity centres. Those are social atmospheres. This is a service-based office. So what we do is help with services. We’re not the social aspect. What we have seen in the province is that some organizations have tried to take on that service industry part, but we find that the Old Age Pensioners Organizations and the seniors centres still send people to our office to help with the servicing and the referrals and the information that they require.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Okay, great. Thank you.

Any questions?

R. Leonard: Thank you very much for your presentation. It’s kind of an exciting thing that you do. Good to hear that there was something before, so there is sort of a building block.

What we have now, I believe, which is not quite close to this but sort of in the vein, are Better at Home programs, right? There’s a little bit of funding from that. Is that something that you would be eligible to access?

S. MacNeill: We work with Better at Home in many aspects. Better at Home has recently come to Quesnel, so we do work with them. We also share our volunteers.

[5:35 p.m.]

Better at Home actually sends seniors, again, to us, because people are looking for information. They’re looking for services. A lot of the times they’re looking for help with, maybe, a will, or they’re looking for information on a representation agreement or a health care directive. Those agencies don’t provide that. Ours does, because we have trained volunteer advocates that do that.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Any other questions?

Thanks, Ruth, for coming up. We appreciate it. Thanks, Susan.

Okay, next we have Quesnel and District Child Development Centre — Lynn Mathiesen.

Hi, Lynn. How are you? If we could try to keep the initial comments to about five minutes, that’d be great.

QUESNEL AND DISTRICT
CHILD DEVELOPMENT CENTRE

L. Mathiesen: Absolutely.

Thank you for this opportunity to present to you. Of the many hats that I wear in my life, I bring two of them with me today. The first is my hat as executive director at the Quesnel and District Child Development Centre, delivering services on behalf of MCFD to children and youth with special needs and on behalf of Northern Health to women experiencing risks and vulnerabilities during pregnancy.

I certainly used the opportunity, as many did across the province last month, to share my thoughts to the select standing committee on CYSN. My recommendation to you, wearing my child development centre hat, is to please consider the information that body has gathered, and bring it into your deliberations related to funding priorities.

We have a desperate situation in British Columbia related to equitable and accessible specialized services for children and youth. For example, the B.C. Association of Child Development and Intervention has reported that the average wait time for a preschool child to access speech and language therapy across the north is 335 days. Hundreds of children across the province referred to early intervention therapies — speech, OT, PT — age out of the program without ever having received services before they go to school.

In addition to increasing resources to therapies, we need new investments in family support workers, behaviour support specialists and mental health clinicians. It makes administrative and economical sense to use our existing child development centre infrastructure to support the behavioural and mental health needs of families with children who are already connected to the other supported services offered at the CDC, such as pregnancy outreach, infant development and supported child development. These complementary investments will help decrease the pressures currently faced in the youth and adult mental health acute care system and the known long-term costs associated with not providing early intervention.

I refer you back to the results of the CYSN public hearings that can and should inform your decisions.

My second, not totally unrelated, hat is as the current chair of the Quesnel community connect committee, a diverse group that is committed to the principles of building healthy communities and to identifying and filling gaps in the supportive services needed by children, youth and families of Quesnel. Our group has broad representation across Indigenous and non-Indigenous sectors, including social services, health, education, policing and business, as well as provincial and local government.

You will hear two main themes across any kind of service sector that has humans providing supports to other humans: (1) we don’t have enough financial resources to adequately meet the needs of the increasing numbers of increasingly complex people who come through our doors, and (2) it’s not always the lack of money. Even if we have funding in place, we can’t recruit employees with the skills we need to fill the positions that are vacant.

My recommendations in these areas are:

(1) We need strategies within the advanced education system and collaborations with employers to get more people trained and out working in the field. That includes early childhood educators, social workers, speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists, physiotherapists, mental health counsellors, behaviour consultants, child and youth care workers, and the list goes on.

[5:40 p.m.]

(2) We need incentives to recruit and retain professionals in our rural and remote communities. In the north, it is not unusual to have a therapy position open 12, 18 months, and there is no local university offering these programs. We would stand a much better chance of keeping positions for these highly specialized professionals filled if we made training more accessible to potential students living in the north. There is a body of research around the increased likelihood of a student returning for employment to the place where they did their practicum.

Even with training available in the north, early childhood education and similar-type jobs can’t compete with salaries offered by the natural resources sector, for example, creating a critical shortage of child care spaces and related services in a community like Quesnel. Qualified ECEs can make more money in an entry-level position in a mill, for example. Employers, as well as families, are impacted when parents can’t return to work for lack of child care space.

Lastly, we need the provincial government to work with local governments in the north to make sure that we have the range of amenities that draw people to a community and to then market the heck out of the joys of living in the north so that we can retain the people that we draw in.

Thank you for your time.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Thank you so much, Lynn.

Just a quick comment in regards to the report that the Children and Youth Committee is doing. That will actually not be done before we finish. So if there was anything specific that was presented to that committee that you feel we should hear, please tell us right now, if it’s in addition to what you’ve just said. If there was anything that you could supplement, we’d really appreciate that.

L. Mathiesen: Okay, absolutely.

The one area in which the government has not increased its investments in the last year is in the area of early intervention therapies. The programs that are funded by MCFD — like infant development or Aboriginal infant development, supported child development, Aboriginal child development — and child care generally have seen investments from this government. It has completely excluded any new investment in early childhood intervention therapies. That’s where you’re seeing enormous wait-lists for children, as I said, who will never receive a service before they enter the school system, and that’s going to be a lifelong impact.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Wonderful. Thank you so much, Lynn.

N. Simons: Thank you very much, Lynn. I plan, as the Chair of the Children and Youth Committee, to make sure that all the information we collected is known by the committee members here. I appreciate you, once again, taking this on as an important area of advocacy. I just simply want to thank you.

D. Clovechok: Thank you for what you do.

R. Leonard: I’ll make sure that Nicholas does, the Chair of Children and Youth, since I’m on that committee as well.

B. D’Eith (Chair): There we go. The point, of course, is that we won’t have the recommendations. We may have the information but not necessarily the recommendations. We do have two colleagues who will be able to inform the committee. But thanks for your extra supplementary information, Lynn, and if there’s anything else you wanted to add in writing or now.

L. Mathiesen: I can absolutely do that.

N. Simons: Bob, do we have another minute?

B. D’Eith (Chair): Of course, Nicholas.

N. Simons: I think that committee members are best served knowing what the impact of the lack of the diagnosis or the assessment on the child before they reach school is. What’s the impact when a child reaches school without having had the interventions necessary?

L. Mathiesen: They start behind the eight ball from the beginning. If a child has speech and language impairment, for example, the process of learning to read takes much longer. So they really don’t ever catch up.

There’s lots of research out there in terms of the economic impact of the lack of early childhood intervention in a fiscal way that suggests that every dollar invested in early childhood saves $10 down the road. In adult-based economies, you see people who have not received the benefits of early intervention services who end up with health issues, touching with the criminal justice system, ongoing poverty. I mean, the list just goes on and on.

The more we can invest in early intervention, we can hope to break some of those cycles. We need that support for our kids and our communities.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Excellent. We appreciate your presentation.

[5:45 p.m.]

Next up we have Quesnel Cattlemen’s Association — Sage Gordon and Jennifer Roberts.

Jennifer and Sage, if we could try to keep the initial comments to about five minutes, that would be wonderful.

S. Gordon: Certainly.

B. D’Eith (Chair): The floor is yours.

QUESNEL CATTLEMEN’S ASSOCIATION

S. Gordon: Good afternoon. My name, as you know, is Sage Gordon. I’m the president of the Quesnel Cattlemen’s Association, and Jennifer Roberts is a director with the cattlemen’s association. Thank you for this opportunity to have some input on the budget for 2020.

With new regulations in the Water Sustainability Act, the agriculture environmental management, the Food Safety Act and the Agricultural Land Commission, the permitting paperwork can be very confusing. The red tape that goes along with each and every form and permit that needs to be filled out — and all on line only — is a big concern for the cattle industry. Not all ranchers or farmers have access to a computer or the Internet or are comfortable using them.

FrontCounter staff are not trained to be able to help the farmer or rancher fill out these forms. The Quesnel Cattlemen’s Association would like to see, in the budget, funding so FrontCounter staff can be trained to help the ranchers and farmers fill out all of the paperwork that goes with our industry.

New regulations in soil testing, waste management, new water licences, archaeological studies and food safety all add to the cost of operations for ranchers and farmers, as some of these tests, studies and licences can be very costly. We would like to see a reduction in cost for all permits that need to be completed so we can continue to run our businesses.

Farming and ranching are very hard to get into. If you aren’t lucky to inherit the family farm, the huge down payments required to purchase land and get an operation going are an enormous hindrance to young people looking to get started in the business. Farming and ranching are a staple in our economy. With all the mill closures, we need to have diversification.

Rural crime is on the rise. So is the cost to farmers and ranchers. This is due to the increase in damage to land, fences and buildings and the loss of property. The biggest concern of all is biosecurity. Thieves can spread unwanted diseases to our livestock, causing partial to complete loss of income. Food security is a core public health program under B.C.’s guiding framework for public health — healthy living and healthy communities. The goal of the program is to increase food security for the population of B.C. With the threat of rural crime and biosecurity, this goal of the government is not being met.

Two other areas that we would like to see changes to are the wildfire mitigation practices and the removal of garbage and debris from Crown land. Much of the current research today supports increasing the size of firebreaks by putting in such breaks along fence lines and other such areas — we are talking increases from tens of metres to hundreds of metres — and seeding these breaks with grass, not trees, which the cows could keep down and keep short.

The second piece. Under the current system, if someone finds garbage or debris on their range tenure or on Crown land, they are to report it to the RAPP line, but there is no funding to remove the garbage or debris. It remains there not only as an eyesore but as a possible health risk, not only to cattle but to other wildlife as well.

We would also like to see secured funding for current programs such as the wildlife protection program and the agriculture wildlife program. Wildlife can have a great impact on a rancher’s bottom line, and these programs help with that.

[5:50 p.m.]

Farming is everyone’s business not only because it furnishes our daily food, but because it is the base of so many industries and so much of Canada’s trade and commerce.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Thanks, Sage. We appreciate that.

Just before I go to questions from the other committee members, I’m curious. It’s my own lack of knowledge, but maybe you could help me on how thieves spread disease. Is that just from being on the land?

S. Gordon: If a thief breaks into a neighbouring ranch and, say, that ranch has a disease, and, at the time, they’re containing it and trying not to spread it….

As an example, we had this out our way a few years ago. We had a disease — we had some bacteria in the cattle — where we had two separate pairs of boots. If we went to the neighbour’s place, we had a separate pair of boots for his place and a separate pair of boots for our place. We had to bleach those boots every time we went from property to property. If a thief enters that property and then breaks into yours, that disease now ends up in your cattle.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Got it. Thank you. I appreciate that, city slicker that I am.

R. Leonard: Thanks for your presentation. I have to admit that we were having a little conversation about what to call your moustache.

Interjections.

R. Leonard: Cool. That’s true.

Just a couple of things. On the issue around the firebreaks, has your organization been in touch with emergency management B.C. to talk about that?

J. Roberts: That came from the recent AGM for the B.C. Cattlemen’s Association in Williams Lake. A doctor — I believe his name was Walt Klenner — from Kamloops has done a lot of study on using cattle in forage management and reducing wildfire fuels. What he found is that keeping down to 20 or 30 metres along fence lines or hydro lines, fire can jump…. We know that fire can go a very long distance, so his research is showing to go hundreds of metres. We put through…. We just got some money, going to the BCCA, of the $500,000 towards using cattle for wildfire mitigation.

It’s just looking at our practices. I’ve been hit twice in the last two years — having our cattle evacuated, or in the process — and the wildfire is going through cutblocks that have been replanted with trees. The cows aren’t allowed or encouraged to be in that area because they damage the trees, and the fire is just going. We make a quick line, and the fire jumps over. You can’t go fast enough and large enough to stop the fires.

We need to look at using our natural breaks and increasing them in size, and then adding water, salt, and attracting our cows to keep the grass down and manageable so we have those natural breaks so that when — because we’re all told — the fire’s coming again, we have breaks.

R. Leonard: When you say along fence lines…. This is my ignorance showing. You don’t put fence lines through cutblocks.

J. Roberts: No. But our fence lines, say…. At this current time, we have a couple of range fence lines that we are allowed to put in. We are allowed, like, a cat-blade’s width to make a right-of-way, and the fence has to go on that. So we’re talking — what? — ten feet, at the maximum. We are looking at making that much, much larger. That will not only act as a fence to keep our cows on the right side but it will also help, two-fold, with stopping the fire.

R. Leonard: On the first issue around the Water Sustainability Act…. I understand that the compliance has been extended for a significant period of time because of the difficulties that have been happening with that. Is there a process now that you can engage in to try and make sure that your suggestions here are perhaps incorporated into…?

S. Gordon: We haven’t really had any real luck on that one. FrontCounter staff actually came to our first well registry class — our two from town here — because they had no clue even how to get into the program. We had to train them. Those who knew how to do it had to train them how to get into their own program.

[5:55 p.m.]

D. Clovechok: Thank you for your presentation. Your industry is a great one. As I mentioned to you, I get to cowboy for my neighbour from time to time, and that’s my therapy.

Around rural crime, which would include…. A lot of people aren’t aware of the fact that there’s still rustling of cattle — big time. I’m wondering if you could just share: is there a strategy that your local detachment or the division has in combatting that?

S. Gordon: In the local detachment, there isn’t really any. We’d have to call the livestock division in Kamloops, and there is currently only one livestock cop in that division for all of B.C. He has to deal with numerous numbers of calls, for one, and we would like to see more RCMP specially trained in dealing with livestock. There isn’t really any special training at this time either, for that.

D. Clovechok: Another thing, too, if you could just touch on it briefly. I know some of the city folks won’t understand this yet, but just highlight the kind of wildlife damage you’re talking about, the extent that they can happen and how that affects your operations.

J. Roberts: The wildlife protection program is a program…. Currently it’s almost yearly funded; it’s not a secured funding. It protects our livestock from attacks by wolves, bears, cougars and other predators. On my ranch, just this year, we lost one heifer calf to a bear attack that killed it. I’m leaving here to go treat another one that was also attacked by a bear. Currently we are looking at — that was going to be a replacement heifer that was killed — a replacement heifer in the fall, $1,200. So it’s a financial hit as well. Ranchers just can’t take it. It’s a lot.

Then the agriculture wildlife program reimburses damage to our forage — our hay that we put up for the cattle. It replaces that. At any time…. We are currently enrolled in the program. So we have a gentleman that comes out from Williams Lake to assess our crops before we cut and then after, and before we pasture again. We put a little pen in the centre of our field or in a place in the field so that the deer or elk can’t eat it. Then he compares in the cage to outside the cage and sees how much damage has been done.

Quite often our fields are between 50 to 70 percent damaged. We can feed at any time, in one field, 40 to 50 deer a night. We’re talking a load or more of hay a year. So that’s getting up into the 4,000s. All these little hits take off the bottom line. It’s very tight at the current time. We need to make sure that we don’t have to worry…. These are everybody’s wildlife. They’re not just our wildlife. They belong to British Columbia, but we’re taking the hit, in a lot of areas.

D. Clovechok: That’s great. The last question I would have for you is: given some changes in the ALR regulations, do you see any problems for your businesses evolving from that?

S. Gordon: There is, with some wanting to pass their ranches down from one generation to the next. They’re having hard times getting another dwelling on their property due to that. Even though it can be done, nobody knows how to do it now, and nobody is sure if they even can do it anymore — set aside a piece of property to put the dwelling of their children on it, so that they can start into the process of taking over the ranch.

D. Clovechok: I’m assuming that the property they would designate would be non-usable ALR land.

S. Gordon: Yeah, it would be a lot — say, an acre or so that they’d set aside. It’d become a residential area, within the ALR, of the ranch.

D. Clovechok: Well, thank you very much. We appreciate the work that you do in the industry, and you certainly have my support.

N. Simons: Thank you very much for your presentation. Just to clarify, as far as I understand it, the recent changes to the Agricultural Land Commission Act haven’t changed the rules around second dwellings. So the process is the same.

[6:00 p.m.]

S. Gordon: No, but it’s a new dwelling. That’s where a lot of people aren’t sure of the…. Nobody knows exactly. They say it hasn’t changed, yet nobody knows exactly how to go about getting it done, and they don’t want to do it.

N. Simons: I’ll say this. Is it because there has been some misinformation put out there?

S. Gordon: There has.

N. Simons: The fact is that changing agricultural land to non-agricultural land use requires local government.

S. Gordon: Yes.

N. Simons: But applying for adding a dwelling — that process hasn’t changed.

S. Gordon: No. But lots of people don’t want to touch it at this point until they know exactly what’s happening.

J. Roberts: I think for myself, it’s not clear what changes have been. I’ve even gone down to the Cariboo regional district, because we happen to have two pieces of property. I want to take two acres off one — that’s 120 acres — and add it to a two-acre piece that we also own, only, due to where we bought it…. The gentleman owned the house on the two acres and ran the rest from that place. We don’t, but all the corrals, hydro, water line are connected to this two-acre piece. We just wanted to move it. We were told there….

It’s an expensive process. I think it’s, like, $1,100 to $1,400. Uuncertainty…. When they’re saying, “I don’t think it’s going to go….” Because we’re moving from ALR to rural RR3 property, there’s a change. Some are saying, “Oh, you can do it,” but the office we applied to goes: “You’re taking out of the ALR.”

N. Simons: There’s a difference between excluding land from the ALR and changing farm use on the ALR. That has been formalized as something that has to be done through the local government. But they had to be there anyway.

I’m sure that as time goes on, and as you ask questions, the clarity will be there.

S. Gordon: It will be.

N. Simons: I really appreciate your presentation. Thank you very much.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Thanks, Sage. Thanks, Jennifer. I really appreciate you coming in.

Next up we have Cariboo Mining Association — Jackie Sarginson and Rick Wittner.

Hi, Rick. Hi, Jackie. If we could try to keep the initial comments to about five minutes so we have time for questions.

CARIBOO MINING ASSOCIATION

R. Wittner: It was about three to 3½ minutes in practice.

My name is Rick Wittner. I’m president of the Cariboo Mining Association. The Cariboo Mining Association has been advocating for placer since 1952, so we’ve been around for awhile — longer than me. I’m also the president of the B.C. Placer Miners Association, which is an umbrella group for all the placer associations in B.C. I’m also a local director on the chamber of commerce. This is my wife, Jackie. She is the secretary for the Cariboo Mining Association.

I’m presenting on two items this evening. The first one is issues that we the placer and other resource industries face. The second is on how carbon tax actually impedes exploration.

In 2017, when the wildfires erupted, permitting staff were pulled all across our region. All permits ground to a halt. It didn’t matter what industry you were in, whether it was logging, mining or whatever. You couldn’t get a permit while the wildfires were on because they didn’t have proper staffing. It didn’t matter whether your permit was anywhere near where one of the wildfires had erupted.

Previous to 2018, permitting in our industry averaged about 60 days, so two months. Since FrontCounter has taken over permit applications, we now face anywhere from 120 to 180 days to have our permits approved.

In December 2018, the NRS released a new, untested system that locked most of the people out of even being able to apply for their permits. The new system was released without any training for FrontCounter staff and other permitting staff, which is causing even more delays.

Other issues we’re facing are staff retention. Recently Arthur, our FrontCounter staff, was pulled from his position for ten months or more. This was done without first finding a replacement and training them to take over his position. We are now faced, in the Cariboo here, with only one permitting FrontCounter staff in Williams Lake to handle all the applications, which I’m sure will cause even more delays.

[6:05 p.m.]

And FrontCounter doesn’t just do placer. They do pretty much all the permitting. We need to see in your budget a serious commitment to ensure that there’s sufficient staff and that proper training has been given to the staff before they’re put in place.

My second item of concern is the carbon tax that the placer industry is forced to pay. We have no choice but to use heavy equipment in our operations. We do not have any alternatives to use or any other means to extract minerals from the ground other than using heavy equipment. While I understand that the carbon tax was implemented to encourage people to use alternate means such as electronic vehicles, public transportation or other alternate means, there are no alternate means for our industry. We are already faced with the burden of high fuel costs.

I would like to suggest that the placer industry be exempt from the carbon tax, similar to the agriculture industry. This will allow us to use the money for further exploration, putting money back into our local communities rather than lining the pockets of government.

In 2016, the CMA did an economic impact study for the Cariboo region, and our study showed that our industry spends over $122 million here, just in the Cariboo. In that same economic impact study, our fuel costs showed that we spend over $664,000 in fuel, and that’s just in a short, five-month operating period.

With lumber mills closing, our region is severely economically impacted, so we desperately need diversified industries like placer more than ever before.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Thanks, Rick.

Questions?

Well, thank you very much for your presentation, Rick and Jackie. We appreciate having you.

Next up we have the Spinal Cord Injury Organization of British Columbia — Nancy Harris, Pat Harris and Heather Lamb.

Hello, how are you? Just a reminder — if we can keep the initial comments to about five minutes, that would be great.

P. Harris: Sure. I think we can do that.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Excellent.

SPINAL CORD INJURY
ORGANIZATION OF B.C.

H. Lamb: I’m Heather Lamb, and I’m joined by my colleagues Pat Harris and Nancy Harris of Spinal Cord Injury B.C. We’re here to talk to you about our Access B.C. program and accessible tourism.

Accessible tourism is a growing market. Roughly, anywhere between 14 and 24 percent of people have a disability, depending on which definitions are used, far more if you include seniors with age-related disabilities. In 2012, about $81.7 billion was contributed to the global economy by people with disabilities in the tourism sector. We want some of that money to come towards B.C.

We know that people with disabilities, like most people, travel with others, usually in groups of three or more, and they pre-plan their trips based on accessibility needs. So they will come here if we can showcase that we have accessible amenities for them to enjoy.

P. Harris: Just a little bit of history about the community development work that we’ve done with Spinal Cord Injury B.C. Between 1984 and 1990, here in the north we helped establish advisory committees in the cities of Prince George, Fort St. John and Quesnel. These advisory committees are really helpful to the community. They’re a go-to resource for communities to look at how inclusive or accessible the communities are.

In 2007, we were the driving force behind the Measuring Up the North project. The Measuring Up the North project engaged 41 northern communities in partnership with the North Central Local Government Association. This project was really good, really important. The communities looked at the extent to which they were accessible and inclusive. This project happened over three years, and it was a fantastic project.

[6:10 p.m.]

One of the key recommendations or findings that came out of that report was the need for communities to have a go-to resource or person that knows about accessibility. And in all of the communities, the feedback we got was that that was so helpful for them, to have that resource. Not only that, but that person was there supporting these communities on an ongoing basis. So it really helped.

To maintain the momentum of our Measuring Up the North initiative, in 2014, we launched the Access North program, and we’ve now expanded that into Access B.C. I really encourage you to read the highlight document, because that shows all the work that we’ve been doing. It’s pretty good.

H. Lamb: Through all of this work, we have learned that accessible communities are also communities that are accessible for tourists. That means that tourists will come here if they know that we have accessible amenities for them.

We also know that accessible communities are quite good when emergency situations occur, because people with disabilities and seniors get evacuated as well, and it’s easier for the host community to meet their diverse needs if the community is already accessible so that we don’t have to figure things out at the last minute.

Through all of this work, we have developed a number of partnerships with many organizations around B.C. These include regional tourism associations, governments and other public and private sector stakeholders to further our objectives of creating a society that is holistic and that works for everyone.

Through partnerships with TIABC, NCLGA, go2HR and many others, we are highlighting existing accessible amenities. We’re helping communities learn what they have that is already accessible. We’re helping them develop more, and we’re showing them ways that they can market those accessible opportunities to tourists who may want to come here to B.C.

SCIBC, with the Thompson-Okanagan Tourist Association, created a position called the universal access tourism specialist position, and it’s filled by one of our SCIBC peer staff members, also a three-time Paralympic world curling champion, Sonja Gaudet, in Vernon. Sonya serves as a dedicated resource for the Thompson-Okanagan area. She’s helping to develop a universal access strategy and supporting stakeholders to develop their own accessible programs and amenities.

We also have a partnership with the University of Northern B.C. We were able to become a community partner on a SSHRC grant, a council partnership engage grant, and that’s held by Dr. Mark Groulx at UNBC in Prince George.

That project is called advancing accessible and inclusive nature access in British Columbia through interdisciplinary partnerships.

What we’re doing with that is we’re evolving and expanding SCIBC’s current accessibility evaluation protocol through a review of global best practices to support greater evidence-based decision-making around accessible tourism and outdoor spaces, and we’re looking at finding accessibility research within relative policy, planning and management communities in B.C.

All of this means that we’re trying to create some best practices or find the best practices. We want to share those with our partners, who are very excited about the work that we’re doing, because it’s helping them with their work to promote accessible tourism and outdoor recreation within B.C.

P. Harris: To cut to the chase, the ask, to further the work that we’ve been doing over the last number of years, we’re asking for $300,000 per year for five years to establish and deliver regional access and inclusion specialists throughout the province, such as we’ve done with TOTA, create more partnerships and leverage other funding opportunities to move towards our goal of a fully accessible province with the related physical, psychosocial, health and economic benefits that would bring. We want to establish and help deliver accessible tourism products, experiences and promotional materials and establish and deliver universal design and accessibility education and training for our stakeholders.

[6:15 p.m.]

We’ve already done that, and we have delivered universal design training to all of our partners — not all of them, but we’re getting there.

We want to look at best practice models and evaluation for accessible tourism-related and community practices and try and further and promote accessible employment and customer service resources.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Thank you very much. Even this committee has experienced this issue of accessibility. We’ve travelled with someone who had mobility issues, and when you get into some remote areas, for example, sometimes you can’t get taxis. The conference centres have no accessibility, or sometimes hotels. There are a lot of challenges. We’ve actually experienced that just in this committee.

If we’ve experienced it, then obviously, for people coming from other countries or other parts of the country or even throughout B.C., it’s obviously a need. Thank you so much for the presentation. We really appreciate it.

Any questions at all?

N. Simons: Thank you very much. I represent the Sunshine Coast, and Powell River has, at times, considered itself an accessible community. I know that’s always a work in progress, I think. I’m just wondering. Did you say that currently there are no sort of best practices for communities and for tourism organizations? Is that what you’re attempting to create as a guide for tourism associations?

N. Harris: That is a piece of what we’re working on. With all our tourism partners, we’re helping, going into communities. The base is what you can do in each community for three days that’s fully accessible in a holistic manner, like getting off the plane, driving across the block to go walk in your park. It’s all connected. You can’t have a beautiful, accessible park that’s beautiful if you can’t get to it.

H. Lamb: What we know is that standards are a bit patchwork in Canada. There’s no single standard that would meet every situation. So what we’re looking at is what the world standards are in different areas and trying to pull those together so that people have a resource that they can refer to when they want to make their communities more accessible. That makes it easier for everyone.

P. Harris: The standards that we’re pulling together here…. There is no definitive standard for outdoor spaces, and that’s what we’re bringing to the table with our partners at UNBC. They’re out there looking at the best practices, not only for universal design and accessibility of the park or outdoor space itself but programming and how people are developing accessibility within their programming — the rafters, the kayakers, the cyclists.

N. Simons: The sailors, yeah.

P. Harris: That’s right.

N. Simons: Thank you very much. We’ve heard from many presenters, and it’s the first that we’ve heard from this particular sector. I think it’s an excellent initiative.

D. Clovechok: Yes, very exciting, and thank you for your presentation. It’s great that you have an advocate.

I’m just wondering. The Tourism, Arts and Culture critic, Michelle Stilwell, is a six-time Paralympic athlete — five gold medals, one silver. She doesn’t like to talk about the silver. Have you been able to talk to her? She’ll kill me for this, but she is an expert on this accessibility, especially around sports and recreation. Have you had the opportunity to speak with Michelle?

N. Harris: Yes.

D. Clovechok: Okay, good.

N. Harris: We did some work around the Para Nordic Games in Prince George. She was up, and we did some conversations and work in that.

D. Clovechok: That’s great, because she’s a fantastic advocate and resource.

N. Harris: Absolutely.

D. Clovechok: Good. Good job.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Thank you very much for your presentation. We appreciate it.

Next up we have Nazko emergency management team — Robert Cosma.

R. Cosma: I was just notified about this about three hours ago.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Good to have you. Excellent. That’s fine. Better to be here than not to be here.

NAZKO FIRST NATION
EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT TEAM

R. Cosma: As you said, I’m Robert Cosma. I’m with Nazko First Nation, and I am part of the Nazko emergency management team. We work outside of Nazko for the community and the valley of Nazko.

I am part of the First Nations. Our goal is to make our community safer and better. In the last three years, we’ve been hit with wildfire. We’ve been hit with floods. So I’ll just tell you a little bit.

[6:20 p.m.]

In 2017, the community of Trout Lake was evacuated due to the wildfires within the community of Nazko First Nation. We were evacuated for 14 weeks for the fire. The entire Nazko Valley community was evacuated that year as well. In 2018, Trout Lake was evacuated again for six weeks due to the floods that took out part of our reserve. In 2018, we were also evacuated for another four weeks due to the wildfires, where the fires actually came up to two kilometres from our houses in Trout Lake.

That’s ten weeks total in 2018 that we were evacuated due to wildfires and floods. That’s 24 weeks altogether in two years that Nazko community has been evacuated — in two years. The need is to protect our community. It can’t get any more of a dire situation. For myself and my family, who live out in Trout Lake, we have our grandfather, who is 92 years old, our grandmother, who is 86 years old. To be evacuated for 24 weeks in two years, to pull them out of their daily routine of working on their farms every day — putting them into a hotel and getting them to eat at one restaurant for 24 weeks in two years — is so hard to watch.

In the hotel that we were staying at, the first week they were on the main floor. The second week: “Oh, the room’s booked. We’ve got to put you on the second floor.” They’re 92 years old, 86 years old. They got to the point where they didn’t want to leave their room.

They didn’t want to even eat the food any more because it’s not their normal diet. They’re used to eating off their land. They’re used to eating the animals that they hunt. Now you’re getting them to eat greasy burgers and french fries and stuff from the local restaurant. Brutally, honest to God, it was so hard to watch. If it were your grandparents or your parents and you were watching that happen…. I cried, you know. My goal with the Nazko emergency team is not to have this happen again for our community.

What we are asking for is some support to help us buy the equipment for being able to fight a wildfire in our community. We are an hour and a half away from the local government to get out to help us — B.C. Wildfire Services. The fire department won’t even come out to Nazko because it’s not in their jurisdiction. If we could get two trailers equipped with firefighting equipment — where as soon as that lighting strikes, we can send out our crew — they can hit that fire right away, in that hour and a half before B.C. Wildfire can get out there. That could save our whole community.

On the ninth of April, we had a fire in the community, right behind the Emcon building in Nazko. If it weren’t for our community members getting onto that fire right away, we would’ve lost our whole community. We’ve had three fires this year alone, and we have no protection out there.

We have 53 people trained in our community with S-100 and S-185. We have eight other members in our community that are trained as level 3 intact firefighting crews with the B.C. Wildfire training. We have five first responders in our community. We have two level 3 first-aiders in our community. We have five members that are going for ESS training and two members that have already been trained in FireSmart. We have the capacity. We have the education and the training in our community. But how good is training if you don’t have the equipment to do anything about it? That’s our biggest problem.

I’ve gone for funding to so many places, and everybody doesn’t want to do capital. No capital. They’ll give you money for research. They’ll give you money for consultants. They’ll give you money for people to write this, but they won’t give you money to help you actually solve the problem in the community. That’s why I came here today. It’s just to ask that.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Well, thank you very much, Robert. We really appreciate you coming in. Thank you for making the time to come in on such short notice.

R. Coleman: Thanks, Robert. Millions of dollars went into the Red Cross. Millions of dollars have been put up for community stuff. But Nazko can’t get $72,000 to actually protect its community because the Red Cross doesn’t do capital and nobody else does capital?

R. Cosma: That’s correct.

R. Coleman: But if we had the capital in Nazko, you’d have two trailers, and I think you actually have a facility to put them in securely.

R. Cosma: Yes, we already have the facility.

R. Coleman: You’ve trained firefighters to be able to attack this, but you can’t get the capital.

[6:25 p.m.]

R. Cosma: Yeah. We asked Red Cross for $160,000 to cover the two trailers and the cost of the equipment, and we were denied. They gave us $40,000 for training. That’s it.

R. Coleman: But no capital to be able to fight the fire.

R. Cosma: No capital. You can train everybody. I could have the whole community trained, but if I don’t have the equipment to do anything, it’s useless training.

R. Coleman: In my understanding also, you can’t get insurance. Folks can’t actually buy insurance because of the fires that have come through there and because there’s no fire protection out there — an hour and a half away from everybody.

R. Cosma: That’s another big problem out in our community. What insurance company is going to give you insurance if your community has almost burnt out three times in a row in two years?

R. Coleman: You’ve taken the initiative, as a community, to train everybody up so that they can fight the fire and be ready to go, and now you can’t get the capital from any of the funds put out by either Red Cross or government or anybody else to be able to actually have the equipment there to fight the fire.

R. Cosma: Yeah. I’ve even gone to INAC and asked them for funding for $168,000 to cover everything, and they said: “We’ll give you $20,000 for research.”

R. Coleman: You can get 20 grand for research.

D. Ashton (Deputy Chair): Thank you for the presentation. Minister Farnworth said there was an announcement about a month ago in Peachland where $5 million was placed out for equipment, specifically for smaller units, not municipality ones, but also ones that would work through their regional districts. Have you applied for that?

R. Cosma: We applied for the $25,000 for firefighting equipment, but as you can see, $25,000 doesn’t really buy you a lot. Firefighting equipment is very expensive, and there’s an overhead. Where are you going to put it? How are you going to take care of it? How are you going to maintain it? Everything like that, right? We have a facility in Nazko that is fenced in all the way around, has cameras getting installed on the buildings. It’s going to be a secure location for what I receive. It will be protected and maintained, right?

D. Ashton (Deputy Chair): Okay. This is a situation where both the province and regional districts have to work together to ensure it. It’s like you said. If you can get onto that firewood that you just spoke about in April, it can make a heck of a difference in having it run wild.

R. Cosma: Well, that’s the thing, right? Our community members that are trained were able to hit the fire right away, and they knew how to get the fire out before B.C. Wildfire came, which was an hour and a half later. They only sent one guy to investigate. Then they made the phone call. Then they sent a crew. That’s now another hour and a half. By the time they got their crew out, now you’re looking at three hours. We’ve all seen a two-hectare fire go to 200 hectares in three hours.

If we don’t have the equipment out there to continue fighting these fires, we could lose our whole community. That’s putting over 120 households out of houses.

D. Ashton (Deputy Chair): Well, thank you very much for your presentation today.

N. Simons: Dan asked my question. It was a really good question.

R. Leonard: When you were speaking of trailers, I was thinking of something that was hauled behind a truck.

R. Cosma: That’s what we’re talking about.

R. Leonard: Okay. I just wanted clarification that this was getting you to the fire.

R. Cosma: Yeah, it’s just a trailer that has the pumps and hoses and everything on it that we could already have set, filled with water, to hook onto your truck and go to where the lightning struck. The fire crew can attack it right away.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Well, I know up at Stump Lake where my parents are, near Kamloops, lightning strikes, and the whole community runs out with the shovels. It’s because they know, the same thing. If you act quickly…. Then they’ll call in the fire bomber, but it takes time.

D. Clovechok: Thanks, Robert, for your presentation. Are you getting any support from the regional district? I’m assuming some of the provincial moneys will funnel through the regional district.

R. Cosma: We received $1,000 from the regional district, and that was to purchase a first-aid kit for our first responders. That’s the only money that they have given us. I had a meeting with them today and asked them if there were any funding possibilities, and they told me no.

D. Clovechok: Ultimately, your overall ask is for what dollar amount?

R. Cosma: It’s $162,544. That’s to cover the cost of two trailers, all the equipment, including the PPE, generators and first-aid equipment and then to do an emergency handbook for every member in the community so that they know exactly what to do when there’s an emergency — who to call.

[6:30 p.m.]

D. Clovechok: You’re trained, ready to go, but you just have nothing to go with.

R. Cosma: Exactly.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Thank you very much for coming in, Robert. We really appreciate it. Best to your community, too, on this.

Okay. Next up we have Barkerville — Ed Coleman.

Thanks for signing up, appreciate it.

BARKERVILLE HISTORIC TOWN AND PARK

E. Coleman: Thank you. I appreciate it. I’m meeting with the assistant deputy minister tomorrow. We’re doing a four-hour tour of Barkerville and Cottonwood House. Coming in late on this, I’ve just clarified a number of issues and topics. So we’re quite concise on what I can present this evening.

Basically, I’m wearing two hats. One, I am the co-chair of the heritage property managers in the province. There are 11 properties, and a number of those are managed under long-term management agreements. I’ve been the co-chair with that group since 2006.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Sorry, what was the group again?

E. Coleman: The heritage property managers group.

The second piece is, personally, I’ve been involved with heritage properties in B.C. since 1998. Then I’m the current CEO of Barkerville Historic Town and Park — which is the largest heritage asset of its nature in western North America — and also for Cottonwood House historic site.

Barkerville Historic Town and Park became a national historic site in 1924 and a provincial heritage property as part of the centennial initiative in 1958. Cottonwood House historic site has been a heritage property since 1964. Cottonwood House is the most preserved roadhouse of its nature in North America.

When we go to Barkerville in its high season, in the 1800s, half of the population was Chinese. The remainder of the population was Indigenous and of various parts of the world that came to participate in that economy. Fundamentally, the economy in B.C. started at Barkerville.

A couple of things that I’m talking about for the heritage properties…. The first ask is that we get into a back-to-back, three-year resourcing and planning framework. Because of government’s limitations with policy, you end up planning in three-year cycles to get funding, whether it’s one government or another in place.

But after talking with all the managers, we’d like to see a back-to-back framework of three-year and then three-year. Basically, you plan your second three-year cycle when you’re a year and a half into your first three-year cycle.

All these properties do get annual funding. So it’s just having that kind of a more stable planning framework for the communities, not only to protect the properties and preserve them but also to have the strategic economic decisions made around the properties so that you have that long-term planning with your private sector or your donors and your various opportunities for other funding from various other groups.

So that’s the first ask. From a Barkerville framework, we are in negotiations on that three-year, back-to-back thinking. I’m quite positive about that. The other part that we’ve been working on is we have about a $10 million protection deferral, so we’re in discussions on that. That investment is pretty well a one-time investment, but it has come to the cusp. We need to look at that.

Probably the largest component is a prescribed two-million-litre water tank by the office of the fire commissioner. It’s about $1.85 million. That’s just one component of that $10 million piece. That’s on the table. I’m just raising awareness around that.

Some other very important investments. We’ve been doing fire management fuel mitigation. It’s actually been successful. We just finished the most complex project in the province of B.C. It’s about a $1.2 million project. A couple of outcomes on that — one, we paid $275,000 in stumpage, which means its revenue back to the treasury. The second component is we learned from that project that because the forests are so dense in certain regions in B.C….

[6:35 p.m.]

Ours was a good example. We were actually able to take off 9,500 cubic metres (1) to create a fire access road, (2) to create a fuel break and (3) to thin the forest in the right manner so that you can protect the adjacent property, which is Barkerville Historic Town.

So we’ve learned from that, and we really would like to see that practice looked at for community interfaces, for different areas of higher risk along highway corridors. We also have learned that that would actually provide some fibre source to some of the mill challenges in the various Cariboo communities, including ours.

The second piece is around egress. On the books, there’s been an egress called the Purden connector, and we’d really like to see that one looked at. At this point in time, it’s probably $3.2 million to finish that up. That actually takes emergency egress for Barkerville, Wells and Bowron over to Highway 16, and it comes out near the Ancient Forest. Because of that, that actually would create a positive tourism circle route. That’s been on the books since 1988 with various plans, but we think that the opportunity is there, both for emergency egress and tourism diversification.

Then the final component is Barkerville Gold Mines. It’s owned by Osisko Mining., which is a $3 billion mining corporation, a Canadian corporation. Barkerville Gold Mines is owned by them predominantly, and that’s about a $350 million mining operation. It’s mostly underground. They have just announced that they are going to put in a $32 million high-voltage line out to our area.

Basically, Barkerville is out of power. We have no power left. We have been doing some diversification, emergency housing, some accommodation, but there’s no power left.

We now have the opportunity, with this investment by Barkerville Gold Mines, to put in a substation that could support the Wells, Bowron and Barkerville area and any other industry opportunities. The substation before would’ve cost close to $14 million and would not deliver very much power out to the area for that Highway 26 corridor. But the new opportunity is somewhere around a $7 million to $9 million investment that actually brings ample power, because you can put that substation off of the Barkerville high-voltage grid.

We’re in discussions with B.C. Hydro and the other partners, the Lhtako Nation and the other nations in our area. Because the Lhtako Nation would like to have some milling-type work out there, as well, for the different species that are out there. Those are part of the elements on the table.

We really would like to thank you for the rural dividend investments, the rural investments. Every single one of those that I’ve seen in this entire region in the north — and I’ve been in the north since 1990 — is definitely making a difference.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Great.

Any questions at all?

Well, thank you very much, Ed, for all your work. It’s wonderful. And thanks for the presentation, everything you’re doing for heritage.

Seeing no other issues, can I have a motion to adjourn?

Motion approved.

The committee adjourned at 6:38 p.m.